Speaking from experience, there's nothing wrong with starting school aged four, as Ed Balls plans to give every child the chance to do. I did, and didn't sleep for the next 10 years, so it can't have done me any harm. Similarly, learning to read at an early age could only have been of benefit: I was able to decipher the Daily Mirror by the time of Greenham Common and feel pretty sure that our primary school class wouldn't live to see adulthood.

Reading the Archbishop of Canterbury's comments on the "extraordinarily anxious and in many ways oppressive climate in education at every level" that has been created in the 20 years or so since the imposition of the national curriculum, made me wonder yet again about the wisdom of the competing parties' plans for education: whether Labour's lowering of the starting age and expansion of the academies programme, or Tory proposals for parents to open their own state-funded "free schools". Politicians on both sides talk of education as the key to individual and social transformation – as Michael Gove put in his conference speech, "the opportunity to choose [one's] own destiny" – but none properly address the link between education and social segregation.

It comes down to economics: what you're worth, in other words. Those who are valued the least think the least of themselves and others. Those who are valued the most think well of themselves and award themselves, as they are rewarded, with education and mobility to attractive, affluent areas largely untroubled by the difficulties experienced by people in poorer ones.

This week, figures released by the University and College Union have shown the extent to which Britain is polarised by access to education, money, safe surroundings or their lack. Dividing the data available on qualifications by parliamentary constituency allows you to see the vast discrepancies between areas. In Bootle, for instance, you're far more likely to have no GCSEs than to have a degree, whereas in much of the south-east the opposite holds true. Areas are becoming less like each other, and less easily averaged out, over time.

Schools without banding and lotteries for places – though these practices are becoming more common – become microcosms of the area in which they operate. Successful schools are those where staff and students feel as though they can take charge of the raw materials of life and shape something good out of it; the less successful are those which struggle to find evidence that such a thing is possible. As an adult, the difference between being seen and unseen often comes down to how well you're able to articulate what the matter is.

Every individual finds it hard to get out of the habit of thinking that the world is divided into the doers and the done-to because that's how it appears. We all do, and we are all done to: the question is one of degree and substance. Every discrete group based on class, neighbourhood and income is detached from the needs and motivations of people outside their group; it works in both directions, up and down. It's more the case that one set appears to get to make the rules, while the other group convinces itself that it has no influence on how those rules get made.

The affluent and highly educated concentrate themselves in areas such as Sheffield Hallam and Richmond, gathering so much power that they can afford to pretend that power is irrelevant; poor and low-educated communities are so stymied by the imbalance that they come to believe they have no power.

A new Joseph Rowntree Foundation report on the impact of recession on communities elegantly states the obvious: in areas that hardly benefited from growth in the first place, the idea that we're now in recession makes no difference. South Wales has effectively been in recession for the last century – those miners' children who made it to grammar school and beyond have had to go elsewhere to make good their educations.

Those still living on the Gellideg estate in Merthyr Tydfil, one of the "communities in recession" highlighted in the report, is so used to its condition of permanent depression that when volunteers began tidying up the local surroundings, one resident wanted the local paper to know about it. "People here don't feel excluded," reports the manager of the local community group. "They've no aspirations to achieve better." Whether she's right or not depends on the context. The man expressing disbelief that the grass verges were finally getting cut didn't necessarily start out lacking aspirations for himself and his area: he'd simply adapted his outlook according to the evidence before him. A resident of Surrey's lush surroundings, certain of his right to enjoy them and the other benefits that flow, might be on the blower to the local paper the minute he saw a trampled crocus. I exaggerate, of course, but not wildly.

Attempts made by the mainstream British political parties to interpret the needs of the "white working class" – and, as is the government's current strategy, to throw money at the symptoms of malaise rather than to address the causes – is a classic example of how social stratification leads to the warping and splitting of common values. A deep lack of entitlement and confidence felt by working-class people, structured in large part by a combination of powerlessness, poverty and snobbery directed towards them by those who are better off, ought not to be confused with the entitlement to "Britishness" that's often invoked by the same individuals.

A fundamental sense of resentment is at the root of some people's wound-licking obsession with attacking, among other perceived threats, "political correctness", "the metropolitan liberal elite" and a "nanny state" which at once is trying to divest you of freedoms and force them upon you. It's important in this area to make a distinction between stoicism and martyrdom. Both place the inevitability of suffering at the centre of human experience. The former requires acceptance of circumstances; the latter a determination to wallow in them. The thing is, neither presents an actual challenge to them. Both say this is how things are, and how we have to live, because things can't be any different.

Starting school at four, or attending a spanking new academy with no social mix, won't alter this relationship between perception and experience because neither proposal has equality, the healer of divisions both real and imagined, as its driving motivation.

• This article was amended on 23 October 2009. The original attributed to the Joseph Rowntree Trust. This has been corrected.

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